Mises Media

Money did originate from the state, no matter how many times contemporary monetary theorists might claim otherwise. Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/backwards-history-money

With its new ruling in Trump v. Cook, the Supreme Court demonstrates it does not understand central banking or the Fed. Clarence Thomas, however, saw through the Fed's lies.  Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/supreme-court-and-supreme-fed

It is important to change our political culture, which treats "democracy," or the "right" to vote, as the supreme political good. Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/libertarian-critique-birthright-citizenship

While Bitcoin in its early days promised freedom from the tyranny of fiat currency, those days are gone. Instead, Bitcoin owners are now satisfied if its value goes up against the dollar. Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/bitcoin-not-freedom-delusion-digital-escape

Comparing Sanders to fascism may seem unusual, but it should not be forgotten that the main leaders of Italian fascism, including Mussolini, were initially socialists before they became fascists. Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/why-bernie-sanderss-ai-bill-fascistic-and-dangerous

What role does the Constitution play when one state has a different understanding of “American values” than another? Unfortunately, the responses have been inconsistent, depending upon which “values” one wishes to promote. Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/calhouns-answer-abolition-petitions

Bob sits down with fund manager and author Lawrence Lepard to discuss his book The Big Print, which argues that the core problem with modern America is not corporate greed or partisan politics, but a monetary system deliberately structured to benefit those closest to the Fed at the expense of wage earners and savers. Related: The Big Print: What Happened To America And How Sound Money Will Fix It:...

Lew Rockwell takes on the deepest puzzle in economic theory: why booms and busts recur so regularly. He lays out the Austrian answer—credit expansion and malinvestment—against the classical economists’ very different question of how economies grow.

Mainstream economists claim that understanding and observing reality is not really “doing economics.” Instead, they believe that all we need are abstract theories that predict events well. But over time, financial markets must bend to the real world. Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/state-financial-markets-tells-us-what-investors-really-believe

On this July 4, Americans will celebrate 250 years of independence. However, what are people really celebrating, freedom or a militaristic regime? Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/july-4-will-you-be-celebrating-founders-or-status-quo

Mark Thornton opens this episode of Minor Issues by tracing how politics shifted from the classical ideal of justice and community order into a Machiavellian struggle for power, privilege, and control. He argues that modern politics is dominated by entrenched elites, special interests, propaganda networks, and a two-party system designed to keep ordinary voters alienated and powerless. On Side B,...

Pandemics offer an alleged challenge to libertarians, as some argue that governments should have the power to order quarantines and impose vaccine requirements. It turns out that statism makes things worse—and that free markets offer the best solutions. Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/hantavirus-market-versus-government-disease-control

Rothbard’s summation: the Federal Reserve was a government-sanctioned cartel engineered by the Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn, Loeb interests to enable coordinated inflation—achieved only with the legitimizing support of technocratic experts and academics.

With the Democrats ascendant under Wilson, the reformers repackage the Aldrich Plan as the ostensibly decentralized, government-supervised Federal Reserve—essentially the same central bank under a new name, with Morgan-allied interests securing control.

The Panic of 1907 becomes the catalyst. Rothbard traces the response—the Aldrich-Vreeland Act and the Aldrich-led National Monetary Commission—as elites studied European central banks and mobilized expert and business opinion toward a central bank.

Around 1906, Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb and his relative Paul Warburg launch the explicit campaign for a US central bank, rallying the American Bankers Association and its leading commercial bankers behind banking reform.

The theory put into practice: imposing the gold-exchange standard on U.S. dependencies and client states—Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Mexico, and others—administered by a cadre of economists and academics and tying client currencies to the dollar.

Enter Charles A. Conant, theorist of “surplus capital.” Rothbard shows how Conant’s claim that mature economies must export capital abroad linked banking reform to economic imperialism—a theory that traveled from pro-imperialists to Wilshire, Hobson, and Lenin.

The reformers’ first victory—the Gold Standard Act of 1900—and the maneuvering that followed, as Treasury secretaries Lyman Gage and Leslie Shaw used government deposits to aid the banks and inch the country toward central banking.

The first organized big-business push for banking reform. Rothbard recounts how the 1896–97 Indianapolis Monetary Convention, backed by Morgan- and Rockefeller-tied elites, enlisted economists to press for the gold standard and a centralized, more “elastic” banking system.

Why the nation’s big banks grew dissatisfied with the post–Civil War National Banking System: an inflationary but rigid structure that lacked an “elastic currency” and pyramided credit on Wall Street, fueling the search for a central bank to coordinate inflation.

Rothbard frames the 1913 Federal Reserve Act as part of the Progressive drive from laissez-faire toward centralized statism. Having failed to cartelize through the free market, big business turned to government to do the job—with intellectuals supplying the ideological cover.

While the pundits are insisting that the late Alan Greenspan was a committed free market adherent, his actions throughout his career spoke differently. In today’s Friday Philosophy, Dr. David Gordon exposes Greenspan for what he was: an opportunist. Original article: https://mises.org/friday-philosophy/greenspan-great-opportunist

Were stronger central government under the Articles of Confederation and a central bank really necessary to win the American Revolution, as conservative nationalists of the era claimed? Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/myth-nationalist-victory-articles-confederation-and-bank-north-america

Kevin Warsh's hawkishness is theater. Every Fed chair comes in tough. The Fed's real mandate is financing government debt and protecting banks. Everything else is propaganda. And tariffs historically precede military escalation. Civil War. World War I. World War II. The same playbook is running now. Mark Thornton joins Ilya Spivak on TastyLive.